Played miniture golf in a mountain with streams and waterfalls. Watched some eat alligators too.
Ate some Thai food. The food in Florida is the best I've ever had.

Mikey found the reciept for his laptop. Yea. Now I can get it fixed.

It was decent, but nothing I've seen yet beats the malls in Las Vegas.

It rained, and that made it VERY Special. I'd like to say it made everybody look like they were contestants in a wet T-Shirt contest, but I'm with Becky...so I didn't look...haha.
We liked the "Revenge of the Mummy" ride the best. It was an indoor rollar coaster, and featured going backwards. The one in Orlando is much better than the one in California.

Next to that, we liked Men In Black...you get to shoot Aliens while riding a rollar coaster. I scored big on that ride too.
They had a Beetlegeus Rock and Roll concert. It was special. Both Becky and I liked Rockin Frankenstein the best.

They make it tough. We've already spent hours on this.
Today, I was on the phone for 28 minutes, trying to get a copy of my receipt. This is the 3rd time too.
The laptop has been busted for over 15 days now.
I should sue. If a company sells you a warrentee and takes your money for a product with the receipt unseen, they should honor it the same way. And if I can get all of the information online, they could too,
Unless they don't want to honor the friggin contract.

I hate killing anything, but there were two wasp nest on our balcony with about 30 wasps.
So, I loaded up three glasses of soapy water (Joy dish soap) and threw it on the nests. It suffocates the wasps. ewwe.
Anyway, I'm feeling blue. I hate to kill.

Browsers: IE-73%, Firefox-19.6%,  Mozilla-2.6%, Opera 8-1.2%, Netscape-0.4%

Resolution: 1024x768-55%, 800x600-25%
Operating system: XP-70%, Win2k-15%, Linus-3.3%, Mac-3.2%, Win98-2%,
Javascript: 90% use it.
It seems clear to me, that if I continue developing this site for Internet Explorer users, I'll reach most of the people out there.
For the people who don't see this site the way it was intended, I'm sorry. But screen real estate is too valuable to waste on an error message that says it doesn't look right because of the browser you are using.

My past is full of good memories. We were so poor. My parents fought a lot, and it was usually about money.
My Mom and Dad were fighting one night. We all left Dad inside the house.
While we were outside, squatting next to a car parked in the driveway,
Mom openned up a can of Cambell's Pork-And-Beans for us to share as our dinner.
The other kids may remember this night as a terrible time, but I remember how good those Pork-and-Beans tasted! Cold and right from the can! YUM!
Its really great that you remember the good things from the past. Those are the memories to hold on to and cherish.
You and your mom are hard-to-find people.
You were both born to be happy! That is your gift!
Look around as you walk down the street. How many people look happy?
Most of the people don't notice you. They stare at the ground with their eyebrows down, or stare intently into space.
If you look right at them, most of them either look away or don't even notice you. Check it out some time.
I know, that if we were strangers, and I saw you on the street, I could smile at you and you'd smile right back.
The beautiful people almost always smile back. You are one of them.

Power is the ability to persuade people to do what they normally wouldn't do.
Power is making a horse, that's 10 times your weight come to you by waving a carrot.

It's the ability to get people to work long hours. Its the ability to starve a country.
Its the ability to persuade an entire country produce the machinery for your country to use.
Why is the United States by far, the richest country in the world?

If you were to put 30 people in a room, 1 of them would be from the US, 10 would be from China, 10 would be from India. So, how does one of those 30 people get most of the other people to do their bidding.
POWER.
In the worlds case, its a suggestion of ability to kill, torture, or make life unbearable.
It is the fear of losing what we think we own.
We fear we'll lose our house if we don't stand in line and be just like everybody else.
In the dark, we've been taught to fear God, to control what we do in the light.
Slavery still exists. It's just taken a different form.
The slaves of today aren't segregate by race. They are segregated by wealth.
The right to be free is still a birth right. You don't earn it in today's world. It is handed to you.
Mankind is still a greedy animal by nature. Mankind is a parasite on its own race.
Possessions are a myth.
If you feel you own anything, you should realize it is just a feeling. You only think you own you land, your house, your bank account. If you are charged with a crime, if you don't pay your taxes, if you just aren't smart, you'll lose them in a heart beat.
I feel it's necessary to say this. It should be obvious.
Me, I chose not to stand in line. I chose to be different.
I get away with what I do because I don't play the game. I'm not afraid of losing everything I have, including my life. I plan on losing my health. I know I'm going to lose everything.
Everybody does. Me, I'll never join this parasitic race.
There are forces that will control mankinds fate.
The future of mankind is in the hands of forces we'll never understand, simply because we aren't focused enough to see.

I shouldn't have to spend a week on my system, making it compatable with Netscape, Mozzilla Firefox, Apple, or anything else that's out there. With a few exceptions, my system works great under Internet Explorer.
When someone mentions a problem, I shouldn't have to ask what their browser is and what version it is, to find out why a BLUE SENTENCE isn't coming out blue. It's funny in a sad kind of way.

If I told an author to show a sentence in the color BLUE, you'd think he could do it without any consideration for what is going to be displaying it. How hard can that be on the internet, to make a sentence BLUE. You'd think that would be ironed out by the different browsers. It's not though. The blue you see above comes out differently on different browsers. Graphics seem to come out okay. How many concepts can you have for what BLUE means?

This blog lets people enter in Formatted text. EG: FORMATTED
Which means a user doesn't have to know HTML to get a highlighted message across.
I suppose that I should be grateful for these differences in browsers.
Complicated machinery requires education to build and repair.
In my opinion, displaying and formatting a screen should and could be simple.
A designer, should not have to concern himself with HOW FAST something is displayed. That should be done by the rendering engine. It shouldn't be a consideration in every line of code written.
I started to use Dreamweaver, Frontpage, Word, Publisher, and Flash.
I chose to write all of the code for this system by hand.
The problem was, they keep you away from the code, and they generate tons of unused code.
When I get done with this system, I'll know exactly what every line of code does, unlike those guys, and my system will contain 90% less code.

With Tandem Cobol, the SORT command is a pig.
People still use it. Yes, it's in the manual. The alternative is simple. Create a key sequenced file, let Tandem manage the speed of the indexing, and it will not only be quicker, the sort will be rerunnable. For small files, it will never hit the disk. The Tandem is the best selection for online databases, meaning it can handle keyed files much better than in-memory sorts. And using key-sequenced files sure beats the heck out of writing a whole program to sort a file in an unrerunnable fashion.
People still use indexes and other ancient concepts presented by Cobol.
I just can't become one of those people. My code must be compact, readable, and efficient.
I don't know why I'm getting off on this tangent.
I guess it's because I'm seeing what a mess the internet has become. Instead of getting simpler, its getting more complicated. There is absolutely NO REASON to create another language for displaying a screen or to access a database.

I'm not sure, or don't remember how, any two browsers could get so far out of sync.
Using Firefox as a rendering agent screws up the whole site, which means I have to rewrite the almost everything to include those users.

Using Internet Explorer, everything seems to work Ok, using the work-arounds for FireFox.
I wonder how much money web developers have wasted on compatabilty issues.

It's coded for Internet Explorer users. Netscape doesn't work well and until Microsoft and Netscape can get together on standards, I see no reason to keep up with them. I want to finish this project and be done with it, and not have to update this site everytime they come up with a new release.
SO THERE!!!

It defies definition. Which came first? The pussy or the cat?

I could have retired. I could have wasted the rest of my life. I could have been out of the rat race.
There is something I'm supposed to accomplish. MY GOD told me this.
My god is nature, and nature doesn't speak English.

Nature makes you hungry, makes you have children and then protect them, all without words.
Nature's told me there's something I'm supposed to do, in the form of an instinctive feeling. I'll know when I've done it.
Then I can fade away. I give my body perhaps 10 more years.
Whatever is going to happen, it'll happen in the next couple of years.
It won't be me doing it though. It'll be nature doing it through me. I'll just doing what I've been told to do.
Maybe it's my destiny to save someone's life, I don't know yet.
Hopefully, I won't be a pawn anymore in ending other people's lives. I hate being the messenger of death.
For some reason, I've been given the understanding of what life is and why we are here.
But I can't share it with anyone, simply because, they just can't see it. You have to know it.
You have to listen to the god that created every cell in your body.
And God doesn't speak English.
I still don't understand why people don't marvel at a blade of grass.
I saw that it was a miracle when I was a child. Why would god have to do a magic show better than that?
We all have been risen from the dead. Why is that so hard for people to see?

They both left me with a negative feeling about myself.
Dad, once again, compared me to the person whose roof he lives under.
His wife's son is a computer professional. According to Dad, he gets contracts all of the time.
So, what's wrong with me.
I could try to tell Dad that I'm not a coder, I'm a designer.
My goal is to create a product that doesn't need my high rates, or a high level of competency to maintain.
If I get contracted to write a report on a system, it won't be just a report.
It'll be the most efficiently written report in the entire system. It will be the best report they have.
I would consider part of my job to be writing a report in such a way, that a 6th grader could modify it.
I could write code that only I could modify. I could even write code with hidden bugs in it.
But that's not my style. I don't want to make a living off of a set of programs.
If his wife's son is always getting contracts to make updates on the same set of programs, it's probably crappy code.
He's making a living off of being sloppy. His code is unmaintainable by anyone else.
My legacy to Las Vegas is a series of Tandems that sit in the basement somewhere.
One person updates it. He does't need any eduction. He runs a menu.
There is no programming expertise needed to maintain it.
I talked to Mikey. He said talked to Kevin.
Kevin told me there wouldn't be anything out there until after the holidays.
He told Mikey something was coming up in Washington and that they'd be willing to train Java programmers.
I put that together like this, fuck em. I've never used headhunters in the past, except for this one time. I learned their tecniques back in the 70's. I know what they do. I know how to they get jobs for people. It's not rocket science.
But I'm not looking for a job right now.
If I was, I wouldn't be using a headhunter. I'd be using my time to make my own contracts. I'd cut the middle layer of incompetency out of the process. A headhunter, an employment office, a job councellor, none of these people are necessary in obtaining work. If they get in the way, they are useless.
About the Raymond James interview, one more time.
I was glad that I didn't get a job working there. They seemed too slow and too incumbered by unnecessary details to be a place where I could be creative. If I worked like that on this website, I'd be spending most of my time filling out forms I created. On this site, I can create more in one day, than I could in one year working there.
About M2, one more time.
It may be fine, for someone else to sit at a desk, and write code exactly as they had been told to do. To me, doing that would make me unnecessary for the project. Why wouldn't the person who wrote the code and showed me exactly where to put it, just write the code herself? Billing comes to mind. They need a body to say that they wrote the code, so they can bill for that person's time. In other words, I'd be useless following marching orders like that.
I'd be last chair, last clarinet, in the band. And that is just not my style!

Every day in this life should count. We have 30000 days to live here. We can decide to waste or not waste each day.

That would be my formula for a good life.
I wanted Becky to be involved in the evolution of this website.
We went to Walmart and bought some cheap desks. Now they are sitting side by side in the bedroom.
I want Becky to help me accomplish something cool. Any female can give birth to a child. Thats as natural as breathing.
Very few people give birth to ideas.
She's already helped me bunches and she doesn't even know it.
Becky's biggest contribution to this sites development, is her not understanding how to use it. |
Everyone has talents. I need her talent to finish this site. If this site can be broken, she can show me how.
She'll try to do things on it without reading the instructions. She doesn't see the functionality of this site, she see's the flash and pizazz of it.
Henry Ford was a genius of sorts. I think they called him "The Father of the Assembly Line". 
His accomplishments wasn't so much the Ford vehicle, it was the assembly lines where the Fords were built. To make the assembly more efficient, he didn't study the hardest worked, he studied the laziest one. The laziest people figured out how to do the same amount of work, with the least amount of effort. They thought about what they did.
He turned Mass Production into the science it is today.

I got irritated at Becky because she didn't seem to know anything much about setting up my website.
I told her we have a choice.
That's to be poor, or not to be poor. The way to be poor was to waste each and every day.
The way to get ahead, is to make each and every day count.
If its spacing out the days until the end that she wants, then we should go into truck driving now.
To me, that is slow suicide.
I want to make each day count. I want to do things most people don't do. I do not want to be normal.
Life is a gift. We have a choice. We can appreciate it, or we can take it for granted.
I think most people take life for granted.

He called last Thursday, when we were on the road. He said, it's the slow season, and not to expect anything until after Thanksgiving, but it seems to me that most people would say, don't expect anything until after the first of the year.
By the first of the year, I won't be looking anymore though. Hmmmm.

I just totalled it up, and that's the bar minimum.
BTW - My F150 gets 15mpg now that I've switched to a 92 octane.
It got 10mpg using 87 octane. I wouldn't have thought a 6% difference in octane would make a 50% difference in MPGs.

It seemed to me that I'd be a good fit for one of those boats. I can deal, maintain their systems, and fix things. Everything there was so familiar. I know I could improve their marketting strategy too. The boat had mainly drive bys (like us), and bus people on it. Most of the people their would never be the targets of a Las Vegas casino.
I was dying to fix half the things I saw. I was this || close to fixing one of their toilets
Their slot enrollment wouldn't let you combine points. It couldn't handle joint memberships. Data entry was rough.
Their cruise reservations was clunky. After signing someone up, you had to search for their name in the database and pull up a change screen to see what you had entered. It looked like a cheesy system.

We took a 6 hour cruise on a Sterline Lines gambling boat. It had the same set up as any small casino in Las Vegas.
Once you get on the boat, EVERYTHING IS FREE!!!
They had a free buffet, several bars and live entertainment.
We spent most of the trip either on deck or at the Vegas Lounge.
I kept rousting people up, and eventually, we created quite a spectacle.
What a blast. These two, huge, (semi-drunk)  guys (that I activated by clap dancing) ended up taking over the dance joint. The impressionist singer got them, Becky, and three girls to go up and dance for everyone. It was wild!
Becky was 100% darling, dancing in front of the audience.
I love her so much!
Eventually I got up and joined her (slinging my suit around in my hand while toe stepping, haha).
I took a low key in the audience.
I kept letting out ear piercing YEOOWWS while appearing to sip my coffee. Its hilarious!

People kept looking around trying to figure out who was doing it. I was wearing a black suit and drinking coffee, so it couldn't be me...haha...right? Becky and I both did it at one time.
God I love sitting back in a bar and causing crap to happen just by giving people eye contract and facial commands. Several guys came staggering up to my table, giving high fives, saying things like, "you know what's happening, you're one of us".
We had several, semi-deep, conversations with an electrician and a state worker.
The state worker said he loved living in Titusville. Its so far away from the big cities, life was stress free. He works 5x8.
The electrician talked about the cruise, the workers, and his life in the small town.

Of all the little beaches we saw, this one just didn't have the touristy quality. Cape Canaveral was just a military block of land, snf Cape Kennedy was hatd to see. I thought it would have had at least on Motel called "I Dream of Jeanee", but, nah.

There were backups all around Miami. At one point, a power line going across I95 was downed.
I still have to laugh when I see a Route 1 or Interstate 95. It seems every state has one (or two).

The ocean is so very interesting. 
There was life everywhere you looked in the waters.
Hermit Crabs
Walking into the ocean, I noticed all of the shells moved. Hermit Crabs were everywhere!
They can't make their own shells, so they find an empty shell, crawl into it and call it home.
You can see these shells roam around on the beach. When you pick them up, they snap back into the shell.
Sometimes they'll come out, as if to say, "What The Hell Is Going On Out Here?". They're so funny.
I found this one that was homeless, sitting on a cement block. He couldn't find an unoccupied empty shell, so I scoured around and found him one. They are picky. It has to be just the right size inside.
Horseshoe Crabs
Standing in the warm ocean waters, I noted the sand kept moving under my feet.
So, I eventually bent over to dig up whatever was causing the sand to shift.. It was horseshoe crab.
These guys are about 5 inches long, prejurassic looking, and ugly, but, they are very animated.

Jelly Fish
I kept finding these purple and  pink, geometrically shaped blobs on the beach.
I picked one up and it felt like old jello, then it moved on its own. It was a stranded jelly fish.
Albino Lizards
I went to use the bathroom around 10pm. It was very dark.
Coming up to the bathroom, the building was COVERED with albino lizards.
Cute little fellows! I think they like to hang out around the building because bugs are attracted to the lights.
Blue Crab
Sometime at night, when Becky and I were looking at the ocean while sitting on the tailgate of the truck, I spotted a shadow moving across the beach. I got up and investigated. It was a Blue Crab that was about a foot wide.
I played with the little fellow. He'd get all flustered and stand up raising his big right claw.
Eventually I quit toying with him, and he ran up into the trees.
Possums
Sometime during the AM hours, I saw one scooting across the beach, running along at about 8mph.
Sea Gulls.
I did my little bird training thing, where I toss up a piece of bread and a sea gull catches it in mid air. About 40 sea gulls came around, but only 3 of them got how to play the game. They would go out in a large circular path, then fly by and hover for their chunk of bread. They were the fat ones, har har.
I discovered why the ocean appears light blue in areas.
It's not the clouds like I'd thought. Where the ocean is light blue, the water is only a foot deep.
That means, in these areas, you can walk for miles out into the ocean without getting so much as your knees wet.
What happens after a hurricane hits an area.
People clean house from the floods,and place their junk on the side of the road.
Also, boats wash up to the roadside. The owners either don't want to mess with them or can't afford to have them relocated back into the water, so they become property of Key West. They are free (clear title and all) to whoever wants to haul them away. If a person wanted free boats, cars, or antique furniture, this is the place to go.
I explored a 40' sail boat that was beached.
It had an eight cylinder engine, the sails and most of it was intact. You could tell somebody lived in it, but probably couldn't afford to get it placed back into the water. It was nasty inside. Imagine how a travel trailer would look if it had been turned upside down. Thats what it looked like. It would be a fun to fix something like this up.

 

This tiny tourist island is about 40 square miles in size. Its streets are narrow and are lined with local curio shops and local restaurants. If you wanted to find a chain restaurant or store, you had look for them (but why would you?). 
We finally parked near a marina and walked around with the other tourist. 
Eventually, we ate at an open air restaurant on the pier.

It was nice, and very laid back. It reminded me of a Joe's Crab shack, but had more personality to it. Hundreds of people were eating there, and pigeons kept hanging around our table.
Rental scooters and electric cars are very popular in Key West.
I thought that if someone rented those Segway, two wheeled Human Transporters (stand up electric scooters), they could make a decent living. Probably a $40k investment could get a small rental business started. hmmm.

We ended up driving Route 1, by the ocean shore. It took us through downtown.
Miami is crazy, even at that time of night.
I thought that driving through town would be a lot easier at 5am than it would be in the daytime.
It wasn't.
All it took was two insane truckers, trying to merge in to one lane to really muck traffic up for miles.
One couldn't back up, the other couldn't move forward. What a mess!
Staring up at the buildings hurt my neck.
Almost all of them were well of 30 stories high. My GPS quit because it couldn't receive transmissions from the satellites directly above. The buildings blocked the sky!
We left Miami in time to catch the sunrise on Route 1, the entrance to the Florida Keys.

My focus kept drifting into my subconscious and we finally pulled over at a hurricane ridden park.
There, I waved over a Sheriff, for a casual conversation. This guy was GREAT!
He'd done the Florida loop two weeks prior. He knew our route! The only difference was, his started from the Keys and ours started from Orlando. Anywy, he pointed out a beach near mile marker 73 that was on the shore, had a bathroom and a shower, and didn't close. He said that was a great place to catch some ZZZ's. He also had a laptop in his car, hehe, like me!
He said the hurricane from two weeks ago wiped out a lot of the Keys. Everything was a mess. He said the Police Division lost 60 vehicles too! While that sounds pretty incredible, as time went by, I realized he was probably telling the truth

Becky and I went bowling tonight. I beat her by the way..haha.
I love to people watch at the bowling alleys
The serious people: They look like they made a terrible mistake everytime they don't knock all of the pins down.

The ditsy people: In the lane next to us, a girl was bowling, WHILE TALKING ON HER CELL PHONE!
The coaches: They tell the ditsy people what they are doing wrong.
The fun people: They laugh and shrug their shoulders on every ball.
The social drinkers: They smile and crack jokes after every ball.
The game of bowling can't be conquered by people or machine folks.
The finger holes in the ball and the condition/location of the pins make the game random.

Try finding a neighborhood in Las Vegas where a black person will be killed, just for being black.
I know, if a white person walks down D street in Las Vegas, he's looking to die.
They'll kill you down there, just because you are a white.

You must have pasted that in there.

Discrimination is terrible in the United States.
It isn't so much the people as it is the laws enforcing anti-discrimation.
To me, it seems like the White Anglo-Saxon Male (WAM) is the most discrimitated against person in the US today.
Bosses have to keep the door opened these days when talking to an employee. Why? Fear of discrimination law suits.
If you're white and middle class, look out. You probably won't get a grant, a scholarship, or welfare assistance.
However, if you're black and lower class, you should look out. You probably will pay high auto insurance rates.
I've never really looked into it in depth, but I know insurance companies discrimate against sex and race.
I have tried this experiment myself. I got a quote from Allstate, told them I was caucasian and I got a quote.

Then I called again, saying I was black and got a quote. They charged more.

Reloading my laptop has left me with some strange feelings. I keep asking myself "What am I doing?".
There is no right or wrong way to do anything in this life,
and in a sense, the future is as much written as the past.
But still, trapped in the present, I feel like I may be doing the wrong thing.
I wonder what would have happened if we never came here. I wonder what would have happened if I didn't quit M2.
I only proved one thing by quitting M2, which was to myself. 
I won't let anyone demean me for any amount of money. I'll alway choose to keep my integrity intact.
The direction I'm headed doesn't seem to be as clear cut as I'd like it to be.
I'm wondering though the present.

It was a sleezy dive, but that's just the way I like em. I still still hear those toasted people laughing...har har.
Daytona could be a blast!

Dogs are easy! We bet $8, and won $15.
Greyhounds are some very fast dogs. Its pretty neat.
The gates open, a rabbit goes around the track, and the dogs run after it.
The track people were pretty sleezy though, and the stadium needed quite a few repairs.

Swapping pieces parts, and watching software load up. I hope it'll all be worth it.
We're going to the Dog Races tonight
This should be fun. We'll bring binoculars, Becky with an 8x10, and me with an 10/30x50.
I'll be watching little dog tongues flying around the greyhounds heads. haha
It would have been a lot more fun to go to Miami, but reloading seemed to be more important.

0A0B0C0D0E

I think its motherboard is fried.
I flashed the bios with what was supposed to be the correct software, and it won't boot now.
Worst thing about it is, I'm not sure who it was purchased from or when. Mikey knows though.
At any rate, I've got to send it in, and I'm on a time schedule. I need to finish this website.
It's amazing, how a simple thing might affect the future.

How are you? My shifter key is sticking. Finger stikin good. haha.

Wouldn't it be nice if my old buddy Lyle Bell at the Hard Rock Hotel got me in!
He'd be the guy doing the hiring there.
We'll find out next week I guess.